San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel is making sure no one overlooks its 100th birthday. Its once-in-a- century offer: two nights in the penthouse for $100,000. For that rate, the luxury hotel is throwing in a few bonus items, including a 10-carat diamond bracelet, a Rolex watch, a gourmet dinner for 12, and a bottle of 1907 Madeira. If that isn't enough to keep the guests in their rooms, they can tool around in a Maserati Quattroporte -- a car that sells for about $140,000 -- during their visit. The Fairmont's centennial deal, part of a yearlong anniversary celebration, comes amid a wave of consumer spending on luxury items from wine and watches to private jets and special events. The Merrill Lynch Lifestyle Index, a measure of stocks linked with luxury brands, climbed 22 percent last month from a year earlier and more than doubled in the past five years. ``People buy Rolexes, they buy jewelry and ... http://www.bloomberg.com

Two compact Renaissance masterpieces found hanging in a retiree's suburban house have sold at auction for almost $3.4 million. The two small panels, by Italian artist-monk Fra Angelico, were bought by an anonymous European bidder on Thursday at Duke's auction house in the southwestern English town of Dorchester. The purchaser outbid the Italian government, which had hoped to return the works to its homeland. Auction house spokesman Guy Schwinge said he didn't know whether the paintings would leave Britain. The 15th-century paintings, which depict two Dominican saints against a background of exquisite gold, hung for years in the Oxford home of retired manuscript librarian Jean Preston. She had bought them in California in the 1960s for a few hundred dollars. CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar says the panels are barely five inches wide. She points out that Fra Angelico is considered one of the great masters of Italian Renaissance Art, and has ...http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/20/earlyshow/main2709798.shtml?source=RSSattr=World_2709798

Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions have raised "serious questions of constitutionality." The non-binding resolution was approved 16-9 without debate — all six Republicans in the chamber at the time and three Democrats voted against it. The resolution says Bush and Cheney's actions in the U.S. and abroad, including in Iraq, "raise serious questions of constitutionality, statutory legality, and abuse of the public trust." "I think it's going to have a tremendous political effect, a tremendous political effect on public discourse about what to do about this president," said James Leas, a vocal advocate of withdrawing troops from Iraq and impeaching Bush and Cheney. Vermont lawmakers earlier voted to demand an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq in another non-binding resolution....http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18229765/

U.S. soldiers are building a three-mile wall to protect a Sunni Arab enclave surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods in a Baghdad area "trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation," the military said. When the wall is finished, the minority Sunni community of Azamiyah, on the eastern side of the Tigris River, will be gated, and traffic control points manned by Iraqi soldiers will be the only entries, the military said. "Shiites are coming in and hitting Sunnis, and Sunnis are retaliating across the street," said Capt. Scott McLearn, of the U.S. 407th Brigade Support Battalion, which began the project April 10 and is working "almost nightly until the wall is complete," the statement said. It said the concrete wall, including barriers as tall as 12 feet, "is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence" in Baghdad. As the wall went up, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates continued ...http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/20/iraq/main2709467.shtml?source=RSSattr=World_2709467

Officials in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, are taking to the air in an attempt to make the city safer. The council has bought three mini remote-controlled airships which are soon to be launched to look down on the city monitoring criminal activity. Each has a camera mounted on it, which beams back pictures to a control room. The Venezuelan capital is regarded as one of the most dangerous cities in Latin America, with gun crime a particular problem. There were a few strange looks skywards in Caracas as the new mini Zeppelin took to the skies. Steered by remote control from the ground, the balloon ducked and dived above the buildings, its pilot showing how manoeuvrable the machine can be. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6576413.stm

U.S. combat deaths in Baghdad have risen steadily since February, when the U.S. military launched an initiative to secure the capital, Pentagon records show. Meanwhile, a hotbed of the Iraqi insurgency has become significantly safer for U.S. troops. This month, 56% of U.S. combat deaths within Iraq have occurred in Baghdad, up from 27% in February. Combat deaths in the capital last exceeded 50% in July 2005. U.S. commanders have cautioned that they expect a spike in casualties in Baghdad. Troop levels are to increase there by 17,000 by early summer. Many troops have left the relative safety of fortified bases and are manning checkpoints and conducting house-to-house searches. The security plan, launched Feb. 14, seeks to reduce violence, so the Iraqi government can seek a longer-term solution to Iraq's troubles. ...http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-04-19-combat-deaths_N.htm?csp=34